A decades-long dream: Greeley man works all summer to complete final 16 of Colorado’s 14ers

The forecast looked grim for Mike Mitchell’s last attempt of the season to complete his goal of climbing all the 14ers in Colorado.

In fact, it looked terrible, as it did every weekend since Mitchell, 50, of Greeley prepared to climb Holy Cross to complete the list. It looked so bad that Verna, his wife and a fellow climber, thought about what exactly she could say that would console her husband on another failed attempt.

Sure, there was always next year, and sure, the mountain would still be there. But that, she knew, would be of little comfort to her husband.

He had waited so long already.

He climbed Longs Peak with Verna in 1979, and after it was over, he said he may just climb them all. He even said he may climb them all by age 30. Then life got in the way. He put his sons, Zach, now 23, and Cory, now 17, in his pack and still climbed the 14ers, only he climbed the same ones, the ones close to Denver, over and over. He climbed Grays and Torreys 18 times.

“That way, I could climb the mountain, and have them back for a ball game they had that night,” Mitchell said.

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Climbing the others took hours of driving ” some of them were at least an eight-hour drive away ” and Mitchell didn’t have that time. So, OK, he changed the goal. He would climb them all by age 40. Age 40 came and went.

He still had the desire: He finished 37 marathons, including the race up Pikes Peak. But life was still in the way.

When he turned 50 this year, he said enough was enough.

He had 16 left, but this summer was the summer he would finish them.

“It was hard to drive by them and say, ‘I’ve still got that one to do, and that one, and that one,'” Mitchell said.

So he spent a dozen weekends this summer climbing, going out almost every weekend, getting up early, getting home late and finishing in time to head back to work Monday at Flood and Peterson Insurance.

It was, by most climbers’ accounts, a summer of crappy weather, and though Mitchell made most of the peaks on the first try, he faced lightning, snow and torrential rain almost every time.

“But that added to the joy,” Mitchell said and laughed.

He was accompanied by his friends, or his wife, or his kids, who learned to love climbing even as they were the reason he couldn’t complete his goal sooner than he would have liked. Zach, in fact, was 3 when he climbed the 14er Culebra unassisted.

“He got fed a lot of candy along the way, and he got told a lot of cowboy stories,” Mitchell said. “But he made it.”

So he was especially thrilled when Eric Alexander, who accompanied Erik Weihenmayer to the top of Everest when Weihenmayer became the first blind man to climb it, agreed to accompany Mitchell up his last one, Holy Cross.

And that’s when the weather, after a summer of making life difficult, finally put her foot down.

Mitchell thought about Labor Day weekend when he pulled up to the parking lot of Holy Cross the first time, when a foot of snow was waiting for them. Labor Day weekend he went to a lake instead of climbing a mountain. He would be done by then, and he cursed his decision as he fought through the snow. Labor Day weekend was one of the few beautiful weekends of the summer. It would have been a nice weekend to climb.

He fought hard, but three feet of snow higher up drove them back.

So there he was, with the snow swirling around him again, on Oct. 9, only this time a little warming spell, a gift from the mountain Gods, made things a little easier, melting much of the snow he had faced a couple weeks ago off the path. The snow turned into a hard path, as if someone had dumped a sidewalk as a path to the summit. Still, there was the matter of the bad forecast, and that morning, the snow swirled around and got harder as they got higher.

At 9:50 a.m. that Monday morning, the Mitchells’ home phone rang, and Verna wondered what to say. It was too early, and it appeared as if the forecast had held true. It will still be there next year, she figured, even if she knew it wouldn’t help much. Before she could open her mouth, her husband said hello and sounded a little choked up.

“We did it,” he said. “We made the summit.”

Verna just screamed.

Then she got busy decorating the house.

Mitchell had champagne that night along with Monday night football and the Broncos. He may have had a little too much, in fact, but that was OK. When he got to work the next day, his co-workers had some T-shirts, books and photos waiting for him. Holy Cross was his 100th time up a 14er, and he finally got them all. He couldn’t believe it. He still can’t.

Maybe it will truly hit him on Nov. 11, when he and a bunch of friends pitch some tents in the backyard and have a party to celebrate. They will look at some past photos, and they will talk about some memorable climbs. Mitchell will think of his father, Jim, who introduced him to climbing. He still keeps a photo of the two on Blanca in 1980 in his desk.

Mitchell is no longer obsessed with climbing them all but he will continue to climb. There’s plenty of other peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park, or around Colorado, or around the country, too.

On the drive to his next peak, he can look at the landscapes and take pride in finally achieving his goal.

“Now I can drive anywhere in the state,” he said, “and say I’ve done them.”